LivePerson plans to engage with Asia

Engage, the customer-contact company set up by direct marketing guru Kevin Panozza in Melbourne last year and bankrolled by marketing services company Clemenger Group, has started planning its expansion into Asia.

The company, which is 60 per cent owned by its staff and 40 per cent by Clemenger, will move overseas on the back of LivePerson, a technology developed in the United States that tracks what people do on a website and talks to them live while they are looking for information, shopping, asking for service and so on.

Engage licenses the technology from the US-based LivePerson Inc to sell in Australia, New Zealand and some Asian countries (though not China or Japan).

Mr Panozza, who set up SalesForce and built it into one of Australia’s largest call-centre companies, said Engage had sold the LivePerson technology to several local companies including Optus, Commonwealth Bank and Jetstar Holidays over the past 15 months.

“Our aim was to build a good base for LivePerson in Australia and then start chasing business in Asia," Mr Panozza said. He had owned 40 per cent of SalesForce, which was sold to direct marketer
Salmat
in 2005 for $64 million (the ad agency DDB owned the other 60 per cent).

“We have a small deployment of LivePerson at Singapore Telecommunications, which is now starting to expand the scope of that project," he said. “We’re also talking to some banks in Asia."

LivePerson is one of Engage’s two main products. The other is a system it developed with call-centre software company Genesys that gives consumers a new way to contact companies via the internet and mobile phones, and gives companies a way to respond immediately to consumers.

Although the LivePerson technology is used by blue-chip companies such as Sony, Apple, Bank of America, AT&T, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and BSkyB overseas, Engage sales director Steven Fitzjohn said selling it to Australian companies was not easy.

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“There are a lot of preconceived ideas about online ‘chat’ systems," he said.

“LivePerson represents a different, more intelligent way to talk to people live online, but convincing people it was more than a chat button on a website took time."

Mr Panozza said the LivePerson system’s “intelligence" lay in its ability to determine the right time to approach a person online, based on their browsing behaviour, the section of a site they are using or looking at, and other factors.

Mr Panozza admitted some potential buyers of the LivePerson technology were concerned it was intrusive, that is, consumers would react badly to their use of websites being interrupted by companies wanting to talk to them.

“It’s an issue that comes up when we first present LivePerson," he said.

“But all the research from overseas shows that consumers don’t mind the intrusion if it leads to better customer service and instant answers to their questions."

Marketing executives said there was another obvious problem with LivePerson: companies would need to have staff available at all times to talk to customers.

“If a company wants to talk to its website users at the ideal time, it needs to have staff to be able to do that, no matter what the time is," a marketing executive said. “That can be expensive."

LivePerson Inc executive Dustin Dean said companies in the US that had used the technology as a “proactive service tool" had reduced their customer-handling costs by a third, while companies that had used it as a selling tool found people were three to six times more likely to purchase something.